25 June 2009

Tres Años

I am really sick of church, which is kind of bad, being as how I am a board member and all. Yeah, inconvenient.

The worst part is that I can't decide if it is actually for a good reason or just because I am pathologically unable to sustain a relationship - any relationship - for longer than three years.

Sigh. My brain is all wrong.

But when Sunday rolls around, I try to think of any excuse not to go to church. When I go, I enjoy it because of the people, but getting there is like walking in your most painful shoes. You just don't want to take that first step.

If I went to a church with 300 people, I could skip with no problem. But I don't. I go to a little church, so when I am missing, it is pretty obvious.

I have been involved in this church for a long time, but I never realized before how much it is based on this whole Law of Attraction/The Secret kind of thing. My old pastor was a Course in Miracles guy, not a "think of a pony and you'll get a pony" guy, and we never studied the basics of the church's teachings, so it just did not occur.

The mush-brainedness of it continues to gall me. One of the notions is that you aren't supposed to think fear thoughts, lest those fears come true.

So during the Swine Flu scare, we put out hand sanitizer but we had to have a whole big dance-around speech about how we weren't going into fear thoughts but that we were just following Health Department orders...but NO FEAR THOUGHTS.

Holy cats, people. It is just hand sanitizer, not a condemnation of your fear-free brain. Germs exist. Get over it and clean yourself off.

(And if you think you are fear-free, you are SO lying. Unless you are an enlightened master. Which you aren't, because you're wasting your time reading blogs instead of going out and doing enlightened master stuff.)

Then this past week, the sermon was about how face-to-face interaction was good and computers were bad because they isolate us.

How about you? Do you feel isolated? Me, I'm looking forward to seeing Suzanne and Mar and Major Bedhead and Average Jane and about 200 of my other favorite isolated people in Chicago.

So I dunno. Maybe I am not cut out for this church thing. Maybe I need another church. Or a break. Or to suck it up and do something for longer than three years. Something. Right now I feel stuck with it until I get off the board in 6 months. Not that I'm counting. Pray for me.

18 comments:

Seems like you need a break first. Ever spend a long weekend as a kid with a friend and by the final day everyone is all prickly and pissed? You just need a break from each other so you remember what you liked about the other person. Can you take the summer off?

Funny thing about the swine flu and hand sanitizer - Swine flu is a virus! Hand sanitizer kills germs! Had people known this, they would realize they still had reason to be afraid - but they didn't. Isn't it amazing how we can get rid of our fears even through ignorance.I know this doesn't help with your problem, just thought I would point it out.It does seem you are not cut out for the church. If you're planning on quitting in 6 months, why put yourself through the agony? Quit now and do something productive with that time. Just a thought.

i used to joke that i had a '3-date rule' about guys. i'd only date them for a max of 3 dates, sometimes less.been a non-attending member almost since i officially became a member at zion. i attended from 2001 when i moved here & then finally took membership classes in january 2007. when my grandma died in april 2007, my attendance began to lag. actually going to the service isn't the problem; it's the getting myself to the church. i cannot bring myself to get out of bed & make the short trip.hopefully you find the answer to your internal questions, be it stay or go.and with regards to the interwebby isolation, i am soooo looking forward to finally meeting you!

I love yoga when I go, but getting my ass out the door is hard sometimes. So I know what you mean in that way.

I'm not a fan of fear thinking or laws of attraction or whatever it's called. Seems like crap to me. I do believe that having a positive outlook will make you happier, and being negative will make you unhappy, but I don't think they'll affect whether an earthquake destroys your house or whatever.

I do not feel disconnected due to the computer. Quite the opposite. Do I wish I saw my friends more? Certainly, but with so many of them in different time zones, computers are an excellent way to stay connected.

I'm sorry, I quit praying a long time ago but, I will keep you in my thoughts and hope that you will find the answers that you seek without a whole lot of life sh!t happening! You must however deliver a hug from me to Major Bedhead when you see her!

Hey. Just dropping in from another site and thought I'd say hi. You have a very nifty blog here. I really enjoy reading your posts. I'm gonna add you to my feed reader so I can keep up with your posts. :) Have a great week!

Well, Suebob, you already probably know my feelings about Unitics. I never saw you as one. I was raised by a Unity minister who teaches nothing but prosperity. You might have her tapes or book in your church bookstore. But whether or not you leave, I'll still read your blog faithfully.

See the whole dogmatic thing gets to me. "Computers are bad", "TV is bad" - I had trouble with churches because of that. But you have been with them a long time. Maybe like others have said you just need a break for a bit and then try again?

Prosperity preachers, Laws of Attraction, etc. All of it seems to completely disregard real life and things completely out of our control. Maybe you need to take a break or maybe you need to make a break. Find a church more in line with your belief system.

You know I'm really with you on that laws of attraction BS. It's positive thinking taken to its illogical extreme.

Can you resign from the board?

I have been at the same church for 22 years. When I am sick of it, I don't go. Sometimes I just go for part of it. A lot of the time it is hard to get there (momentum and all that) but when I do get there I'm glad I made it.

Face-to-face=Good and Computer=Bad is just not true. I gather you are at BlogHer...looking forward to hearing about it.

I go through some of these feelings about my church too. I'm not on the board, but I am in the choir. Sunday I went to half of worship on a whim, and more than one person asked afterward where I had been. I recently got back from a long trip, but that's not what they meant. My closest friend in town is a church friend, and she wants me to go to worship every Sunday. I don't believe I need to go for the sake of my soul or anything. I think I should only go if I want to, if it's enjoyable. I don't think church should be like exercise. I think about quitting because I think there's some subtle misogyny embedded in the church's whole world view. But it would be hard to explain to someone how I see it. That's one of the things that keeps me from quitting. But the main thing that keeps me from quitting is I enjoy the puja celebrations, which are about once a month. Krishna's birthday is in August, and I wouldn't want to miss it. So I guess you could say I do it for the holidays (along with the incense, flowers, candles, Sanskrit, and singing). I guess this should have been my own blog post. I wish you all the best in deciding what to do in your situation.